her at my house,’ Alex says.
‘Oh yeah, I thought you looked familiar.’
I don’t know what to say to that—I want to point out that we also went to school together—but I stick with my trademark move and say nothing.
‘Well, I’ve got to go say hi to Jacqui. I’ll talk to you later,’ Vanessa says, and she touches his arm and then walks off.
Alex sighs after she’s out of earshot.
I hitch myself up onto the kitchen bench beside him. ‘Are you two still friends?’ I ask.
‘Not really. Or, yes, we are but in a weird way,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘About what?’
‘Seeing her makes you sad.’
‘No, it doesn’t. I’m not sad. I’m…’ But he doesn’t finish the sentence. I raise my eyebrows.
He folds his arms as if he’s not going to say anything, then says, ‘Fine, seeing her makes me feel a teeny, tiny bit sad.’
‘That sucks.’
‘But it’s not like I still want to be with her. I don’t. I just… I don’t know. It’s weird.’
Alex is jiggling his leg and I reach out and put my hand on his knee to stop him. Only after I remove my hand from his leg does it occur to me that I’ve never touched him before. I’m suddenly self-conscious about the intimate gesture.
He looks at me, as if he’s thinking the same thing about us never having touched before.
‘Zach does that leg jiggling too. It drives me nuts,’ I say, suddenly filled with the need to explain.
‘Must be genetic,’ Alex says, smiling now.
‘Or he learned it from you.’
‘That’s scary. To think of all the things he might have learned from me.’
‘What’s the best thing about having three brothers?’ I ask, partly because it seems like an engaging question, but also because I am paranoid about the things I might have missed out on not having siblings. Like, could there have been a whole other Natalie, a better Natalie, who would have existed if she’d had a cool older sibling to show her the way in life, or a younger sibling who looked up to her.
Alex makes a face at my question.
‘Humour me. I’m an only child,’ I say.
‘Never feeling alone.’
‘And what’s the worst thing?’ I’m getting good at these questions now.
‘Never feeling alone.’
‘Ha.’
‘It’s like…sometimes they take up so much space in my life I’m afraid I’ll never have room for all the other people I want to fit in. And I worry about them. Zach’s okay, he’s so smart, and he’s got you and Lucy, but I think Anthony gets bullied a bit, and Glenn thinks he’s invincible and he’s going to grow up and be a bit too wild.’ He stops, and seems surprised at himself for saying so much.
I’ve never heard him talk like this. And I’ve never looked at him up this close before. His eyes go all crinkly when he smiles. He has messy eyebrows, like Zach used to have before Lucy started plucking them.
‘My parents broke up,’ I say.
I have no idea why I just blurted this out.
‘I know. I heard Zach and Lucy talking about it. I’m sorry. I always thought your parents seemed like a nice couple.’
‘You’ve met my parents?’
‘No. But Mum talks about you, and them, so much that I feel like I have.’
‘It’s not like a bad break-up, with yelling and fighting over money or anything like that. It’s all very relaxed,’ I say.
‘That’s good.’
‘I mean, I’m eighteen, so there’s not a child anyone needs to have a custody battle over or anything.’
‘That makes things easier, I guess.’
‘And I feel completely and totally fine about it all.’
‘Sounds ideal.’
‘Yes. It is ideal. They’ll have a perfect divorce.’ I plan to laugh in a mature and ironic way, but what comes out is a kind of hiccupped sob. I put my hand to my mouth, more out of shock than anything, and tears start burning my eyes. The thing is, I’m not a crier. Never a public crier. Not even when a guy on a train said ‘You’ve got something on your face’ very loudly to me, and everyone around us looked at me and when I touched my face, thinking it was a smear of peanut butter, he said, ‘Oh, it’s a pimple, it looked like something else for a minute,’ and I had spent thirty-seven minutes and missed my usual train that morning getting my foundation to a point where I thought my skin looked pretty good for a change.
I’m not about to start public crying now, at this party.
‘Hey,’ Alex puts his hand